My grandfather was like this, and not with soft wood. We try to burn Australian hardwoods and that takes quite a bit of force to split. He could pound through it like a knife through butter. There’s a definite art to hardwood, looking where the slightest fault might be. You can’t just smash it in the middle, your block splitter (preferred) or axe just bounces off it.

Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC872sqjMNC8kHU0GU0ShZFw while cautioning that she seems to be genetically engineered to split wood. Her technique is like watching an Olympic athlete. No wasted motion at all, all energy delivered to the maul straight down. She’s a muse.

It's a combination of technique and the type of wood. Even with perfect technique, some wood is simply too hard to split. I've got the bottom 5 or 6 rounds of a bigleaf maple sitting in my yard that I simply can't make a dent in. You're welcome to take it if you can split it :)

In former times you had to serve a twelve year apprenticeship before you could be trusted to split wood for barrels, you can do a PhD in rocket science in less time.

So many of the top comments look like parodies of HN comments

> I miss the part where the axe gets stuck and you hsve tovturn it over.

Hit it around the edges, like taking a chord from the edge of a circle, and try to use the top half of the bit to do cutting. Good ax technique depends on accuracy, on top of which you can slowly add strength as your accuracy improves. If there's a crack in the end of a round, you should be able to put the bit of the ax directly into it, which will normally split it wide open without much effort. Different species of wood have different characteristics though, so terms and conditions apply.

For future reference, the phrase is “hear, hear”.

Then you're really going to love this.

The proper term is a shortened form of "hear him, hear him," which was necessary because British Parliament didn't allow clapping or cheering. Instead, if you wanted to show agreement with a speaker's point, you'd shout out that everyone else should "hear" him.

Not to be confused with "hear ye," which evolved from the French "oyez," which is the imperative form of "to listen," which was shouted at a crowd before an important announcement.

I don't think I could have vibe coded that.

At the very least, he photographed and built models of logs and his own yard.

This I don't know, but at least the topic is not related!

Damn I loved that movie!

I love it also, but I think the comments are pointing to an unmet need for firewood splitting simulators.

The comments are suggesting that someone could go to town adding different kinds of hatchets, mauls, axes, woods, and different swings, and people would eat it up.

Both can be true. It's cool and fun but simulation is a well defined term.

Yes, but obviously this toy faces a challenge when folks who take this stuff seriously walk by. I immediately want a bungee to put around it so the wood doesn't go everywhere. I also want to split it finer than in quarters. Had to nope out.

to be fair this wasn't being shared to a site filled with four year olds

If the hydraulic splitter could be electric, so it would not be so loud, I could see that task being meditative. Preferably if the rounds could on a raised platform, so they could just be rolled onto the thing.

Next request, the wood could stack itself somehow.

as camping is to "glamping," splitting wood is to "sprinkle wood?"

I absolutely hated it as a kid, but once I got into my late 20s I started loving it. A great workout and you can go at your own pace as long as you don't wait until the last minute to get it done.

I hated cutting wood, stacking wood, splitting wood, all of it. We ran a potbelly stove in the living room when I was a kid for heat. I hated the stove too.

The only thing I don't miss is rolling a piece of piss elm over to my city living "tough" cousins after two or three pieces of oak and watching the maul just bounce off. Always funny.

Gotta agree with you there, log splitters rule. We got a little 4 ton electric one for my mom, and on some pieces it would stall. I thought, what a wimpy thing, but then hitting those pieces it wouldn't split with an axe, I realized, those were really hard to split pieces. Just growing up in the 80s we didn't have one cause my dad didn't believe in them.

Nope, splitting green wood is much more difficult than splitting dried logs, so I often cut a tree in the spring, stack the rounds, then split those rounds in the fall.

People overestimate how dry wood needs to be to burn correctly. Just have some ultra-dry kindling (seasoned for 2+ years) and you won't have any problems.

On the contrary, I know some folks who let all their wood dry too far, and it burned way too hot and ruined their stove (and almost burned their house down).